BvCMS - Bellevue Church Management System

Gone are the funny curly braces and all that other stuff. We have greatly improved how to create a vote link inside an email and you are going to love it!

You will need to know the Organization ID and, if you want a Confirmation to be sent, make sure there is a Confirmation on the Messages tab for the Organization. Then just find the group to whom you want to send the vote link and click Email individuals from the toolbar. Notice that below the body of the email that there are brief instructions on how to create the vote link.

Click here to read more and see screenshots of just how to do this. Give it a try!

Karen

We have made it even easier to add a new Organization. There is a link right there under Organization in the main menu. If you are creating Organizations for a new database, just click that link and fill in the blanks. If you have existing Organizations that you want to copy (example: a Student Ministry Life Group that meets on Sundays at 8:00 AM), just go to that Organization and then select Add Organization under the main menu. This will create the new Organization and retain the basic settings from the one you were last viewing. You can also check a box that will allow you to Copy Settings if you want to copy the other settings like settings for online registrations. Read more.

Take a look at the Contact Search page located under People in the menu. There is now an option to search based on the Results in addition to all the other options that have been available. The items in the drop down menu are identical to the checkboxes on the Contact form.

We have also added a Contactor Summary Report on the Contact Search page under Contacts Management. This report looks at three factors: Start Date, End Date (both of which are required to generate the report) and the Ministry (which is optional). It will ignore any other options that are in your search.

The Contactor Summary Report lists the name of each person that made a Contact, their People ID #, the Description of the Contact, the Ministry Name and the number of Contacts of that type and Ministry that they made during the selected date range. This means that one person might be listed multiple times if they made more than one type of Contact and/or made contacts for more than one Ministry.

This is a helpful tool for analyzing who is making Contacts for your Ministry. Perhaps you will want to send a note to encourage those that you notice have gone the extra mile and have made a greater number of contacts during a certain time period.

Remember, you also have the Convert to Query (Contactors) option if you want to email Contactors directly from Query Builder.

Read more

Karen

This is not a brand new feature, but I’m not sure we ever blogged about it. So, in case you are not aware of this, you can view a list of all the emails that you send via BVCMS by looking on your Growth Tab>Contacts>Sent Emails. When you click that link, you will see a list with the date, subject, etc. If you click the email subject, you will see the email itself with a list of all the recipients.

We also have a link for Received Emails with the same information. These links are on every record in BVCMS, so you can easily check to see if a person was on the recipient list for a specific email.  Read more

Yes, you read that correctly. You can now search our wiki documentation using Google search. On the sidebar of the wiki there is now a link to Google Search the Documentation. This link is located under the normal search box.

Both searches are blazing fast. However, the standard search will be more current while the Google search is more advanced. The Google search will, or course, return Google-style results. This means that instead of seeing just a list of links, you will see the number of results returned, the title of articles as well as a snippet of text from the article. Some results will also display an image from the article.

Why will the standard search be more current than the Google search? It is all about robots. Google-bots crawl through the web building an index of words on a page in order to know what to return as a result. How often do Google’s robots update their index? This is based on the popularity of the site. Therefore, Google will index some very popular sites hourly and others might take a couple of weeks. We figure that a Google-bot updates the index on our site about once every couple of weeks. If we update the BVCMS wiki today by adding a new article, it will not display in a Google search until after Google has indexed it. So, if you don’t find what you are looking for with the Google search, try again using the standard search.

Remember, we blog about our new features on the BVCMS News blog, with links to any corresponding wiki articles. So, you will be alerted to new articles if you check out the blog each day. Articles that are less than 7 days old are highlighted with a green asterisk.

PS If you are a geek-wannabe, you may want to read Google’s explanation about how Google search works. Check out the video. Of course, if you are already a geek, you probably know this.

As promised in our last newsletter, we have a load balancer, otherwise known as a Web Farm now up and serving your requests to two different back end servers now. They’ve been up and running since Sunday evening (2/12) at about 8:00.

Here’s how it works: we have two servers now serving up requests to everybody, including Bellevue. We’ll call them joshua and caleb. You might click a link to view a member named Abraham and that would be served up by joshua, then your next click might be to see his wife Sarah and that might be served up by caleb. But you’ll never know it; they are chosen at random and it will just work seamlessly, and hopefully really fast too.

This was a huge step in our ability to grow BVCMS into the future. Now, adding more churches will never be a problem, we’ll be able to scale out easy as 3,4,5. That was one big step to get from 1 to 2 however; we had to change all sorts of things and the way they work under the covers. The basics are that there can be no operation that has dependencies on the state of a single web server; everything must come from either the database or another central resource.

This change will also make it safer to publish changes during the middle of the day. We’ll be able to bring joshua offline to publish new changes while caleb continues to respond to requests. Then reverse that to get caleb updated.

Here is a nifty little feature that we just added. You can now run a Query, go to an Organization, and add everyone in the Last Query directly into your Organization. This is not the usual way to add Members to an Organization.  However, for example, if you are creating an Organization and need to enroll everyone who is also enrolled in any of several other Organizations, you could run a Query to find those people and then add them very easily to the new Organization using this feature.

Update: this only works for Admin right now. We’ll open it up soon.

You will find this option when you select Add from Tag on the Organization page. There is an option near the top named (last query). When you select it and click OK, everyone from the last Query that you ran will be added as Members to that Organization.

Read more about Adding and Removing Organization Members using Tags.

During recent training session for a local church, we mentioned a sign that sits in our office area that reads: “Every number is a soul for whom Jesus died.”

We mentioned that in the course of explaining our heart regarding the ministry of BVCMS. Yes, it is a database that tracks attendance numbers and contribution totals and all of the normal statistics that churches need in order to help them evaluate their effectiveness. But behind those numbers are people who either need to know Christ or who are already believers and need to be discipled and receive fellowship and encouragement from your church.

The only way that we as a church can track people is by their attendance (participation) and giving. These are not actually measures of spiritual growth, but changes in either of these factors are indicators that should be noted. For example, if a person normally attends a small group every week and gives regularly to the church and suddenly their attendance becomes sporadic and their giving plummets; that is an indicator that something may be going on in their life. They might have health issues, family problems, lost their job, or any number of things. The point is, that they need a ‘touch’ from someone. By reaching out to them early you may help prevent a more serious problem.

This is where BVCMS can help you. By having your lay leaders as users on BVCMS, they can easily monitor the attendance in their groups and quickly communicate with absentees and with visitors. This can also be done by your staff as well.

For example, using Query Builder, you can identify those who regularly attend a small group, but have missed more than two weeks in a row. From Query Builder, you can then send an email just to touch base with them and then record that as a Contact. You can also create a Task for each person and then assign it to the appropriate staff or laity to make a visit or a phone call.

All of the above actions were covered in our first webinar – “Contacts, Tasks, and Assimilation”. Take a look and see how this might help in your ministry. There is also a blog post about Tasks with links to some ‘how-to” articles. These are just a few of the tools that are an integral part of BVCMS.

Karen

We have simplified the “Forgot Password” process. Now you get a link to set your password directly. Gone are the funny, sometimes embarrassing, system generated, two word password combinations.

It works this way for creating a new user account too. You get a welcome email to set your password first thing.

Also, an Admin can send mass emails to congregants, inviting them to create an account. When they click the link in their email, it creates a basic MyData (access to their family only) account.

Karen has written a wiki doc about this here.

Since Tuesday, due to a problem with Bellevue’s servers, BVCMS has been hosting Bellevue Baptist Church’s database in addition to our 100 other churches on our Rackspace site. That’s not just a 1% increase however; Bellevue’s database is HUGE compared to most of our clients so we really had to scoot over tight to let them have a seat on our bus. I’m sure many of you noticed the slowness of the server yesterday. Anyway, all should be well now. Last night late, we doubled the capacity on both our web server and database server and it looks like we’ll be able to host this big family and more for a while. Pretty soon, we’ll be looking at doing a Web Farm of BVCMS servers where we can spread the load across multiple servers. We’re committed to great service in both hosting and support.